Exhibitions
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On display
Coffee + Art
Sir Alfred East The Moon and the Manor House c.1894 Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, bequeathed by Hayden R I Fraser, January, 1975
Friends
Past event
Universo Brasserie & Bar
Art Bite Free
Join the Friends for coffee and great conversation, then enjoy a 30-minute Art Bite, where a special guest talks in-depth about a work that is special to them.
It’s a great opportunity to test your perceptions in a friendly environment with like-minded and curious others.
For the October Coffee + Art, art historian Margaux Warne as she discusses Sir Alfred East's painting The Moon and the Manor House in Endless Light on the first floor.
No booking required.
Related reading: Friends
Exhibition
Endless Light
29 June 2019 – 8 March 2020
Historic European artworks that embrace the thrill-filled moments which art and light provide.
Collection
Sir Alfred East The Moon and the Manor House
London-based artist Alfred East painted The Moon and the Manor House at Upper Swell village in the Cotswolds, where he kept a small studio from the 1890s. This evocative composition is one of ninety-five paintings he showed in 1895 in English Landscapes: illustrating the Effects from Dawn to Moonrise, his third exhibition with the Fine Arts Society in London. While studying at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1881, he was influenced by the work of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, among others. East was born into a shoemaking family in Kettering, Northamptonshire. He spent two decades in this industry before dedicating himself fully to painting, after taking night classes at the Glasgow School of Art while managing his brother’s boot factory there in the 1870s. East settled with his family in London in 1884, held his first exhibition at the Fine Arts Society in 1888 and then was sponsored to spend six months in Japan in 1889 – the first English artist to work extensively in that country. He became one of Britain’s best- known painters and remained an inveterate traveller, working also in France, Spain, Italy and North Africa.
(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)
Notes
How to Book Friends Tickets
To book tickets from your phone, follow these simple steps (or click here for instructions with images).
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friends@christchurchartgallery.org.nz | 03 941 7356
Notes
Underworld 2 by Tony de Lautour
This article first appeared as 'Painting offers a multiverse of symbols' in The Press on 21 June 2017.
Notes
Walk the Beat
Volunteer guide Rod McKay talks about his life, being an art tourist, and guiding Gallery tours.
Notes
The Art Whisperer
Christchurch Art Gallery volunteer guide Bella Boyd talks about her love of guiding, her favourite works in the Gallery collection and interpreting art with poetry.
Commentary
Mediating Reality
In the late 1980s, a significant shift for photography in Aotearoa New Zealand was identified in two art publications. The essays and images in these books showed how artists were utilising new strategies, breaking away from the prevailing documentary photography tradition that was, and still is, widespread in Aotearoa. Six Women Photographers (1986) was edited by artists Merylyn Tweedie and Rhondda Bosworth for Photoforum; and Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography (1989) was the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Gregory Burke for City Gallery Wellington. The artists included in both publications questioned in various ways the assumptions and rules of image making, manipulating the media and making a political move from the standpoint of taking a photograph, to making one. No longer was a photograph considered a truthful representation of reality. Instead, photography was seen as a product of, and a participant in, current social and cultural values.
Commentary
Do You See?
With the death of Julie King late in 2018, art and art history in Aotearoa New Zealand lost one of its great champions and major scholars. Julie was born in Yorkshire and grew up and was educated in Alnwick, Northumberland; she moved to Christchurch in 1975 to take up a role lecturing in the newly formed art history department at the University of Canterbury. She retired three decades later, having pioneered the teaching of New Zealand art in Canterbury.
Collection
Julia Morison Dulia
In the early 1990s, Julia Morison used gold and shit in many works, exploring the idealised and base elements of human experience. She drew on the Jewish Sefiroth as a model for thinking about the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical. “Personally, I need to put some kind of order on experience for sake of sanity and negotiation,” she said. “The Sefirothic structure, or Tree of Knowledge, is really a metaphorical file and folder system for all; a conceptual paradigm for understanding everything. Putting that at the core of my practice gives me the freedom to admit everything and anything, micro and macro, metaphysical and corporeal, as legitimate content. It also gives me an interface to compose works.”
The title of this work, Dulia, is a Catholic term for worship given to saints and angels. Here Morison has pressed gold and excrement on to handmade paper balls, which are threaded together like the beads of a catholic rosary—an invitation to meditate on the relationship of the sacred and the profane, on a monumental scale.
